I have followed the pip install approach to add everything that I wanted for Python. Even though I did the same for jupyter when I was starting it (“jupyter notebook”) it would only start the Python 2 kernel, although Python 3 “was there” but not active actually. After some digging I found that a similar […]

It is exciting to have a new machine, such the Lenovo Thinkpad X-1, but the process for setting it up can be a bit tedious. So this is a small guide what worked or didn’t through my small experience in installing Debian linux. [Just for the fun of it I proceeded with the installation of […]

Between 12 to 19 of September 2016, we organized the Ondřejov Summer School 2016, which was held at the Stellar Stellar Department of the Astronomical Institute (Czech Academy of Sciences), in Ondřejov. The main aim of the school was to provide students hands-on experience with real observational data, i.e. to understand observations, reduce them, and […]

Among the simplest installation methods to install IRAF are SciSoft (for RedHat/Fedora based distributions) and Fernando Avila Castro iso files (for Ubuntu/Debian based distributions). However, both require root privileges. What can you do when you do not have these permissions? Ureka [1] comes in rescue! It is easy to install (download and run the installer![2]) […]

How to make a dictionary of dictionaries with lists inside? For example we have a number of stellar spectral types (spec) and for each one of them we have a series of spectral lines (line) and their equivalent widths (ew). By creating a rather complex dictionary we can then call the list of values for […]

Although the are many information on how to use the genfromtxt (from numpy) there is not a clear demonstration (that I found…) to show how to easily read a text file with columns of data (including strings – it is straightforward to read columns of numbers with loadtxt for example). Suppose that we have the […]

The easiest way to install any Python package is through PyPI. So, matplotlib is not an exception and we installed it on a CentOS (v6.4) machine without any errors (of course after updating numpy). But when we tried to plot something we couldn’t see anything. This is actually a backend issue, and when we installed […]

THELI is package for the automated reduction of astronomical imaging data. One of the prerequisite is Python 2.5 or higher (as THELI uses numerous shell and Python scripts). As I had already installed Scisoft 7.5 (with Python 2.5) I though that everything was ok. I started using THELI and indeed no problem up to the […]